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Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Binders full of murder

This is supposed to be a thing where he shows the interviewer that he cares soo much but how do you not read this as something a very strange person would do?
The past weekend, I met with the New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, in his office. He had something he wanted to show me.

When we entered, stretched out before us in a row on a large wooden table was a line of three-ring binders, each four or five inches wide, with red covers.

The mayor arbitrarily flipped one open. The binder fell open to the image of a black man with dreadlocks, lying prone on the pavement in a pool of his own blood. Dead. The mayor leafed back one page, and there was a picture of the same man, alive, looking into the camera. The mayor then leafed forward a few pages, and there was a police report about how the man wound up dead.

The mayor explained that he had instructed his staff to compile before and after pictures of every homicide victim in the city and some information about that person when they were alive.
Apart from readily accessible morbid conversation pieces for when reporters come to visit, I can't think of any reason to have this in your office. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it's weird.

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